Of Letters and Lists
by Lucillia
Summary: A comment Harry makes to one of his friends knocks McGonagall for a loop because, once again, something that should be impossible has happened either to or around Harry.


"So, that's where all the missing parchment went." a rather stunned Minerva McGonagall said as she made her way back to her office, only arriving there through her extreme familiarity with the castle borne through decades of having inhabited it and the grace of a particularly bored and unimportant god.

What had McGonagall so surprised had been Harry Potter's description of how he'd received hundreds of letters which had followed him across the country until Hagrid had finally gone and retrieved the boy from his relatives. The reason this was so startling was because no student in the history of Hogwarts had ever received more than two acceptance letters, and a second letter was only ever sent out in the most dire of situations.

Harry's receipt of hundreds of such letters was frankly impossible.

Sure, she'd noticed that a sizable amount of parchment and envelopes which had not yet been processed by either her or the Headmaster had gone missing from her desk before she'd finished the First Years' acceptance letters the year before, but she'd assumed that there was a reasonable explanation for it since Albus had been in particular need of letter writing supplies due to the mass of mailings he'd been sending out in regards to something that had to do with his job as Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards. Being in charge of social events was very serious business, especially when it came to dealing with wizards who were notorious for being prickly over the smallest slight and able to sling magic that could easily kill someone about with the ease one would normally associate with de-gnoming a garden.

She knew for a fact that Albus himself hadn't sent the extra letters to the Potter boy because she had been helping Albus prepare for the After-meeting cocktail party that was being held after the end-of-year session before the International Confederation of Wizards moved to its new temporary location in Kyoto until the massively outdated facilities that were in Geneva which were in a state of decided disrepair could be fully upgraded. As for the other professors, there was really no possibility for any of them aside from maybe Trelawney or Binns to have done so since everyone else was out either vacationing, tending to personal business, or brushing up on their subjects in order to better teach their students as the Arithmancy Professor was wont to do. As for Trelawney and Binns well, she'd warded her quarters and workspaces against the woman, and Binns was barely aware of what decade it was much less who the new students were going to be and why one of them might be important.

Considering all these things, it was really understandable that she'd be surprised that Harry had gotten hundreds of acceptance letters from the school, especially since they were magically binding apprenticeship contracts that bound students to Hogwarts for a period of no less than seven years. That, and the only way she could think of for it to have happened as the boy had claimed was through a bout of accidental magic on Harry's part, which made her wonder how he could be such a mediocre student considering how powerful he was since his magic would have had to get around the Hogwarts wards, and duplicated both her and Dumbledore's magical signatures.

In his office, Albus Dumbledore simply blinked and shrugged when the portrait he'd had watching the Potter boy had come in and reported Harry's frankly unbelievable tale. If he dwelled on all of the impossible crap that the boy had pulled before he was even five, his brain would have likely broke before he could process it all. As far as he was concerned, this was just one of a myriad of items which were added to his list of reasons for why it actually would be possible for a child to be able to defeat a Dark Lord who'd had several decades of experience on him. The even more impressive fact that Tom had picked up the Idiot Ball and run with it when the boy had first gotten within a hundred miles of him was another one.

But, then again, tons of people had a tendency to pick up the Idiot Ball in that boy's presence, himself included...


End file.
